DFI PC64 i820 Motherboard

Article Index:

DFI PC64 i820 Motherboard - Page 1

DFI's
PC64 - MotherboardMore
i820 and RAMBUS action on the test-bench

Intel's
new i820 chipset is slowly being accepted and
brought to market by various motherboard
manufacturers. It is obvious that this has
been a pains taking process for the Motherboard
Vendors in the market, as release dates for many
of the major players have slipped due to
compatibility and stability issues. DFI is
one of the few motherboard vendors to release a
full i820/RAMBUS implementation. This is our
first look ever at a DFI product, here at Hot
Hardware. What did we think? That's
why you are here, we suppose. Please, read
on.

The
board itself is well designed and good real estate
planning was implemented with respect to component
placement. Note the perfect placement of the
ATX Power Connector in the above picture.
Why can't more designs be like this? The ATX
cord is out of the way of the CPU but still nice
and close to the Power Supply. This makes
for very easy installation and better "cable
management" within the system. You
should be able to tuck that bulky ATX cord away
nicely with this set up.

On the down side,
we are stuck with the AMR (Audio Modem Riser) slot
again, as we have seen in other i820 based
boards. This is a new standard that has
evolved for the Value PC space and has no real
place, in our opinion, in a
performance based product, which clearly this
board is. The AMR slot is intended to house
inexpensive "Soft Modems" which will
never perform to the levels of their discrete
counterparts. Unless you are really pinching
pennies and need to go with the cheapest modem
solution you can find, this slot is simply eating
up space that could have been used for a full PCI
slot. On the other hand, if you are able to
FIND a Riser Card that performs well, then the AMR
slot is a wash. Either way, these is nothing
better than a 6PCI/1AGP setup, which would have
been the preferred configuration.

The on board audio
on the PC64 is an Aureal 8810 chipset and provides
A3D 1.0 functionality. Not the most leading
edge 3D audio available, since A3D 3.0 is right
around the corner, but still a nice convenient
addition.

PC64
Installation / Setup

Near
perfect

The
PC64 installed and set up in our system in record
time. The board does an excellent job of
sharing PCI IRQs within Win98, which is almost a
necessity these days. Here is a shot
of the BIOS screen showing ways in which you can
configure IRQ resources.

Click
image

Once again, we wish
all motherboards came with this capability.
I am also happy to report that this feature worked
flawlessly allowing me to specify what IRQs the
various PCI slots were going to occupy. The
settings were set to auto in this picture but rest
assured you can select a range of IRQ designations
in this set up.

Another interesting
feature in the BIOS is listed under the Advanced
Chipset Settings, called "RDRAM Device
Napdown".

What does this
do? The world may never know....
NAH! We expect someone to set us straight on
what this setting is for. For now, we
noticed no measurable performance difference in
the tests we have for you next. In addition,
as with all i820 boards, you will notice that the
PC64 has an option for selecting "Fast
Writes" across the AGP bus and the board
comes with built in AGP4X support.

In general the PC64
is a stable board that is also very
compatible. We set up our machine with a
GeForce DDR Graphics card and there was no
evidence of the flaky lock-ups we were getting
with the last i820/GeForce set up we reviewed.